Family

Fare well my dear child and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends that we may merrily meet in heaven.

Flesh of flesh,

I have a wife, I have sons: we have given so many hostages to the fates.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something in-conceivable. I can’t help it. I was born sneering.

Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife.

Come mothers and fathers,

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.

My sister and my sister’s child,

There were his young barbarians all at play,

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

Not merely a chip of the old ‘block’, but the old block itself.

We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.

My mother groaned! my father wept.

From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents.—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

There is no school equal to a decent home and no teacher equal to a virtuous parent.

A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family— But not much in between unless a college.

A mother’s pride, a father’s joy.

O Woman! in our hours of ease, Uncertain, coy, and hard to please, And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made; When pain and anguish wring the brow, A ministering angel thou!

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet To think how monie counsels sweet, How monie lengthened, sage advices, The husband frae the wife despises.

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate Was snatch’d from Afric ’s fancy’d happy seat: What pangs excruciating must molest, What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast? Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d: Such, such my case. And can I then but pray Others may never feel tyrannic sway?